Alice Dunbar Nelson

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Alice Dunbar Nelson
Alice Dunbar Nelson
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Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. She was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and last married Robert J. Nelson, another poet. She was bisexual and her husband Paul Dunbar was reported to have been disturbed by her lesbian affairs[1].

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[edit] Life

She was born in New Orleans to middle-class parents Patricia Wright, a seamstress and former slave, and Joseph Moore, a merchant marine, who were people of color and part of the traditional multiracial Creole community of the city. At a time when fewer than 5% of any people went to college, Moore graduated from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892 and started work as a teacher in the public school system of New Orleans.

In 1895 her first collection of short stories and poems, Violets and Other Tales[2], was published by The Monthly Review. About that time she moved to New York. In 1898 she married the poet/publisher Paul Dunbar there. She was teaching at the White Rose Mission (White Rose Home for Girls) in Harlem, which she had co-founded. After her marriage, she and Dunbar moved to Washington D.C.. She and Paul Dunbar separated in 1902. Alice Dunbar then moved to Wilmington, Delaware and taught at Howard High School. In 1910 she married Henry A. Callis, a prominent physician and professor at Howard University, but this marriage also ended in divorce. She later married Robert Nelson.

From 1913 to 1914, Dunbar was coeditor and writer for the A.M.E. Review, an influential church publication produced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church). In 1916 she married the poet Robert J. Nelson. From 1920, she coedited the Wilmington Advocate newspaper and published The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, a literary anthology for a black audience.

Alice Dunbar Nelson was also an activist for African Americans' and women's rights. In 1915 she was field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states for the woman's suffrage movement. In 1918 she was field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1924 Dunbar-Nelson campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. She was made an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.

[edit] Works

[edit] References

  1. ^ Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Penguin Books Ltd, 1991, page 98
  2. ^ Violets and Other Tales, Monthly Review, 1895. Digital Schomburg.

[edit] External links